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Services in the cloud

http://www.lothie.com/" style="red">Mary Ursula Herrmann is a Network Security Analyst living in Juneau, AK. She has worked in Information Security for over 15 years, and obtained her CISSP in 2005.

Last week I talked about solutions for mobile device management, and mentioned that some of those solutions were designed to operate in your enterprise, while others were designed to operate in the Cloud. I've talked about the Cloud in the past, mostly in terms of making sure you pick secure vendors, but I haven't really gotten into specific offerings.
“The Cloud” really just means the Internet, but it's a specific reference to using the Internet to do things that might have traditionally been done inside the enterprise. Email is a good example of this concept; email servers used to be situated within the enterprise as a matter of course, and “webmail” accounts were for individuals. Now, however, more and more organizations are turning to vendors such as Google for business email hosting, first smaller businesses and more lately even larger ones. To many organizations, it makes sense to migrate services that are fairly standard (such as email) to the Cloud, particularly if many of their employees are “road warriors” or do a lot of telework. This type of service delivery is known as Software as a Service or SaaS.
SaaS doesn't stop with email, of course. Rather than give all users a separate desktop machine running given applications, organizations can choose to use Cloud services instead. For instance, if you currently use Microsoft Office, you could instead use Office 365 through a web browser. I myself write my guest blog articles using Google Drive in my browser (or, sometimes, on my smartphone). If there isn't a Cloud “version” of an application, you can still put it in the Cloud by utilizing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and installing apps on virtual machines that are hosted outside of your enterprise. Your users would log into these machines from anywhere to do their work, which would make contingency planning a lot easier.
What's the downside? Well, as I mentioned in my previous articles, if you are handing your services and/or infrastructure over to someone else, you have to be able to trust that vendor with your data. Here, as in so many other things, there's a “you get what you pay for” type of ethic where there is pressure to achieve maximum efficiency at minimum cost, and you have to decide which vendor(s) will be the most reliable and best safeguard your data.
To tie this back to last week's article on mobile device management, some of the best MDM applications are Cloud-based. This means, for you, that you don't have to spin up servers to install the management software on, and you don't have to have people in your IT department who know how to use it. The Cloud service does everything for you, including providing all support. For some, this will be a welcome relief, since MDM has never been the easiest part of a sysadmin's job; for others it will be a loss of control. You need to decide which is more important for your organization and implement the solution that will serve you best.

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